2. Les Juifs de Pologne et les tribunaux d’honneur

Abstract

“I am ready to make the journey,” wrote Henryk Z. in 1948 in a letter to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Having left Poland after the Kielce pogrom, Henryk Z. was in the process of rebuilding his life as a DP in Stuttgart and awaiting further emigration approval. Nevertheless, he was volunteering to return to Poland to testify against a fellow Jewish survivor, a member of the Radom Judenrat, whom he accused of sending his wife to her death. Postwar files of both Polish state courts and Jewish tribunals, including the Civic Court by the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, the Central Court and Rehabilitation Commission in Munich, provisory tribunals in small DP camps, as well as ad hoc religious tribunals, courts by political organizations, and judging panels set up in local Jewish committees and Landsmanchaften are filled with such documents. This evidence shows that, to find peace by pursuing justice (and revenge) against those accused of sabotaging their own community, people were ready to cross the Iron Curtain, and despite all the hardships it entailed, return to places from which they had both physically and emotionally only recently escaped. My article will discuss how in the immediate post-war period, Polish Jews (witnesses, defendants, and court audiences) as well as their stories and documents crossed borders between the East and West and how this transnational dynamic impacted the practice of both Jewish honor courts and Polish state courts and shaped communal stories of suffering in the Holocaust.